Pre IHSW, Gridding & More

The January IHSW is here!  That's the International Hermit and Stitch Weekend!  The idea is that when and if you can from Friday-Monday you ignore the world and stitch your little heart out and get a serious case of stitcher's butt.  You can read all about it here and sign up for the January edition here.

So here is Enchantment of Winter BEFORE the IHSW, its seen a little needle time but not as much as I'd like.  Its been a very busy week for me, lots going on.  As I type this I've spent my evening getting ready as tomorrow evening I'm joining up with about 18 other stitchers for a weekend away in a quiet country B&B to stitch our little hearts out!  Hopefully I'll make some great progress on EOW, if I don't spend too much time chatting and visiting!  Of course I have my camera all packed, so I will share with you here after the weekend.

On my busier nights when I was either tired or didn't have much time to stitch I pulled out Polar Friends - Night and made a little progress on that too.

I've received several comments asking about the gridding many of you saw in one of my earlier posts this month.  I love e-mailing my commenters back when the comment warrants an answer but so many of you don't have an e-mail address linked to your profile!  I have my comments e-mailed to me and if you have an e-mail address linked to your profile when you hit reply, it pops in your e-mail address and whoila I can send a personal note to you!

So here's the information... I gridded my Ink Circles Seasonal Mandalas after so many mis-counts and encounters with those damned frogs!  There was no specific distances between my stitches, I just did a running/basting stitch, making sure that each vertical or horizontal line was exactly 10 stitches apart.  I wanted to mimic the darker grid lines on the chart that mark out 10x10 blocks of stitches.

Most of you were curious about the thread I used because I called it my "special gridding thread" (or something along those lines).  Really it isn't special, nor is it specifically for girdding but it is THE perfect thread!  I received a spool of this years ago from another stitcher.  Its by Sulky and its their Silver Metallic thread.  This is a thin, flat, ribbon-like metallic thread you'd probably find it in quilting stores.  The main reason I like to use this compared to a conventional thread or cotton floss is that when you are cross stitching if you happen to leave your grid in as you're stitching you won't be able to pierce the gridding thread with your needle as you stitch... unless you happen to use a sharp one!  This makes removing the gridding thread later on SOOO much easier.  It usually just slides right out.  I haven't had to grid often in the past but sometimes I've used it to put in a basting line down the left hand side of a sampler so that I know the beginning of my rows match up.  Its also been great for gridding blocks for Round Robins for the participants to stitch in.

So, there you've got it... one of my little stitching secrets!

Non-Stitchy Stuff

The snowploughs rolling out to hit the highways

The weather has been just brutal lately!  The temperature has been up and down like a yo-yo its either -5c or colder than -20c.  When its not brutally cold, its either snowing like its the end of the world, or we're having freezing rain.  I've had to drive to/from work in really bad weather twice in the last two weeks.  Its very stressful!  On Tuesday night we had rain, which apparently froze on contact.  To get in my car the next morning, we had to pry the door open with a putty knife!  After starting the car and letting it run with the defrost on at full blast for over 20 minutes... I still had to spend over 45 minutes chipping ice off of my car and windows so that I could safely drive!  If another person who lives in a warm climate that doesn't have winter... and I mean TRUE winter with sub-zero temperatures, snow and freezing rain says they LOVE winter, think snow is so PRETTY and would love a WHITE Christmas I'm going to slap them up side the head!  When you live with winter the way us folk in norther climes I can tell you that winter can be quite miserable, and downright dangerous, you stop seeing the pretty very quickly!

I was also asked if I'm still going to Weight Watchers.  Yes I am, I think I will forever be going to Weight Watchers, just to maintain my goal weight takes a lot of work and vigilance on my part.  Sadly I'm not one of those people who can eat what they want and not exercise.  If I don't live by the 80/20 rule and exercise on average 4-5 times a week I WILL gain weight!

What do I mean by the 80/20 rule?  Be good 80% of the time and just do your best 20% of the time.  There are times, moments, events that still trigger bad choices in anyone who has ever been overweight.  No one can be perfect, and imagining that you can be perfect and perfectly loose weight turns your journey into an incredibly stressful one.  Its all about checks and balances, if you know you're going out for a nice dinner on Friday you can balance that out by eating right and moving more a couple of days prior to and after that dinner out.  I also make a point of making sure all of my other meals are low point and earn some activity points.

The last week and a half have been very tough for me.  I've made a lot of bad choices (chocolate and lots of it), salted peanuts, crackers, lots of very yummy things.  Oh and a devine slice of a "chocolate bomb" when we went out for dinner on Saturday to celebrate my Mum's birthday (which it was -25c without the windchill that was fun to be out and about in).  I was very shocked when I weighed in at my WW meeting on Wednesday and the receptionist told me I had lost this week!  Wow!  So I lost 1 lb!  I started going back to WW the previous week and between my last weigh in at the very beginning of December to the second week in January I put on 3lbs... it could of been worse.  So I'm back on the road to getting back to goal 9lbs to go.